Credit Where Credit Is Due

I've recently been taken to task (nicely, by someone who handed me a beer first) for giving myself insufficient credit on my fencing progress. This is up there with "You need to work on angles and redoubling" in the list of common feedback I receive, but usually it just provokes owlish blinking from me.

If and when I say "I'm not a good fencer," I mean it. I'm not. I'm a beginner! I don't expect to be a good fencer. But too often I think people hear "I'm not doing well enough," which isn't at all what I mean. You'll never hear me say "I'm not a good student." or "I'm not good for someone who's only been fencing for a year," because both seem demonstrably untrue. By that metric, I'm doing great! Similarly, when I walk away from a fight or practice listing off all the things I did wrong, that doesn't mean I'm not silently acknowledging what I did well, it's just that what I did wrong is the list of things that I need to focus and work on.

Unfortunately, this means my practice notes look skewed to the negative, and unless you're Donovan, you haven't witnessed my "I'm going to be a good fencer one day!" excitement that hits every few months or milestones.

Am I as good as most of my friends? No. Let's be real, here. I hang out with far too many OGRs and MoDs for that to be true. Do I have peers within the community and even within my friend group? I do! But I don't have a good idea of how many, or where I stand in the SCA fencing community at large. But hey, that's what events are for, and I've already made plans to better benchmark myself and my progress. And I am making progress. There's nothing I like more than sparring someone I haven't fought in several months and seeing how differently the fight goes.

And the more important question: Am I as good as I'd like to be right now? I don't know. I could be better. I've been taking it easy the past few months. That's been a good call, and I've enjoyed being focused on other aspects of my life, but I'm a little sad the timing matched up with when I would otherwise have been prepping for Pennsic. But such are things. My Pennsic experience won't suffer for it, and I'll pick back up again in the fall.

So how about this: I'll start folding my positive progress into my practice reports along with my critiques, I'll continue to try to be better about taking compliments, rather than blushing and mumbling shyly, and as part of my self-assigned Pennsic homework, I'll come home with a list of things that I am definitively good at, rather than "personally improved" or "not bad enough to focus on right now." Sound fair?

And in the meantime I'll continue having fun, poking at the holes in my abilities, and frowning and dithering because I'm a creature of structure constantly reassessing how to best move forward and grow in this skill without a set path. (And, ideally, documenting whatever path I create in case someone finds it useful later on.) That's most of what I'm here for anyway. That and simple love of violence.